THE OLDEST TOES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 170, 20 July 1935, Page 7 (Supplement)

THE OLDEST TOES.

ANTEDILUVIAN IMPRINTS.

OUR. COMMON ANCESTOR ?

•SOME SCIENTIFIC CONCLUSIONS

Some 250,000,000 years ago a creature wallowed in the mud of what is now Northern Pennsylvania. As it crawled away it left its tracks. The mud hardened into rock.

As ho clambered among the hills of Southern New York and Northern Pennsylvania, D. H. Harding, who happens to be not only the local photographed of Lanesboro. Pa., but au amateur geologist, saw those tracks. He cut out a whole slab of them and sent it to Cornell. Scrutinising the tracks carefully with the practised eye of a palaeontologist. Dr. I\. E. Caster of that university decided that the imprints were of the highest scientific importance." They were made by the oldest toes in the world.

Some creature like a primordial horseshoe crab left these petrified imprints, say a few experts on fossils, basing their conclusions on the patterns in the rock, the hitching gait, the tail mark, the vague outline of a head. But Dr. Caster holds that this fossil spoor testifies to something still more primitive. He conjures up a vision of an animal which was a sort of missing link —a cross between something still finny and something that was the ancestor of ns all. "Paramphibius," he calls it, which means "almost a land and water dweller."

Reconstructing the Creature. List jn to E'r. Caster as he describes a creature that must be reconstructed, with such aid as palaeontology can give, from nothing but its footprints: The animal was possibly six or eight inches long. Occasionally he walked so closely to the ground that his belly markings were impressed in the mud, and commonly dragged his tail. If Paramphibius was an amphibian he may have looked much like a large presentday salamander. He moved mostly under water, but he could crawl out on land. Presumably, he was still more at home in water than on land. If he was an amphibian, a creature that lived now on land, now in water, he was the great-great-grandaddy of all other land animals that have toes, and that includes us too. View these tracks with respect then. Paramphibius was a fish-like thing that tried to live on land but could not do so entirely because of his structure.

Imagine a fish which has transformed its floating bladder or air bag into a sort of lung so that it can breathe directly from the atmosphere. What good is a fish on land? There are lung fishes to-day that show what happened.

Process of Development. It took' million of years before a real land animal could develop from this half-fish. His crude fore feet, still much like fins, became our hands. His real feet were better adapted for walking. In the process of evolution the body had to be kept moist and to spend half its life in the water. Our to&ds, frogs, newts and salamanders are such doubledwellers still. Lung fishes were their ancestors, as they were of this unknown Paramphibius, which had already ceased to be a true fish. Out of him came the reptiles—the giant dinosaurs and out of the dinosaurs came the birds and out of the birds, hairy, warm-blooded animals.

Prostrate yourself before Parampliibius. He is the immediate ancestor of all higher creatures —of man himself. He bridged the gap between the backboned creatures of the land and the fishes ot the sea. A creature still older came, before him—a creature that existed at least 'half a billion years ago, when the land of the earth was a steaming jungle, even to what is now the frozen Arctic. Out of him came man and civilisation in a slow upward climb in which gills became lungs, fins became fingered hands and toed legs, and something that was little more than a ganglion of nerves in the head became a thinking brain. Tho end is not yet. "Who can say what old Mother Nature, something of a jokester, may evolve out of our greatgreat grandchildren a million years from now," muses Dr. Caster.